The invention provides a video conference system and method based on a front soft MCU. A soft conference management module is embedded into an existing hardware video conference system to divide a conference room into a front conference room and a main conference room. Identity authentication and theme guiding services are provided in the front conference room, and meanwhile the point-to-point or point-to-multipoint video private chat function is provided in the main conference room. The identity authentication mechanism of the video conference system is improved without changing existing system hardware, the exchanging modes of video conferences are enriched, and the system and method have the advantages of being simple in operation procedure and wide in application range.